“
Maybe this was how you stayed sane in wartime: a handful of noble deeds amid the chaos.
”
”
Scott Westerfeld (Leviathan (Leviathan, #1))
“
It's hard to imagine, but even amid so much violence and chaos and loss, somehow the universe sometimes still manages to look beautiful.
”
”
Jay Kristoff (Obsidio (The Illuminae Files, #3))
“
Resisting life's predictable challenges and cultivating inner stillness and peace of mind means good management of our internal world amid external chaos. It enhances our confidence in preserving the transparency of our thinking. (“Finally unwind “)
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
There is no panacea, or utopia, there is just love and kindness and trying, amid the chaos, to make things better where we can.
”
”
Matt Haig (Notes on a Nervous Planet)
“
Because while she might be able to feign timidity within the confines of isolation, out here—amid chaos, destruction—I knew she’d become something entirely different. I was just waiting. Every day, patiently waiting for her to understand the breadth of her own potential; never realizing I’d entrusted her to the one soldier who might take her away from me.
I should shoot myself for it.
”
”
Tahereh Mafi (Destroy Me (Shatter Me, #1.5))
“
Evangeline staggered to the balcony rail, as if she might see that building amid the sea of chaos by the city walls. She had never had a brother, or a father. She hadn’t yet decided which one she would like Aedion to be.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7))
“
...books provided much-needed ballast - something we both craved, amid the chaos and upheaval...
”
”
Will Schwalbe (The End of Your Life Book Club)
“
Amid the chaos and confusion, one thing alone was certain: for the first time, a woman would sit upon the throne of England.
”
”
Helen Castor (She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth)
“
As much as evil and mercenary selfishness never fail to rear their ugly heads-- sowing destruction in all directions-- so, too, do love and beauty never fail to emerge from the debris. Amid the chaos, there is always something that grows.
”
”
Shellen Lubin
“
After the 11 September attack," March editorializes one morning, "amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame 'the CIA' or 'a secret rogue operation.' But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line--who knows, maybe even the CIA's scared of them.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Bleeding Edge)
“
He is the eye of my hurricane; the calm I am drawn to amid the chaos of my home.
”
”
Lauren Blakely (21 Stolen Kisses)
“
The creative act is primitive. Its principles are of birth and genesis. Babies are born in blood and chaos; stars and galaxies come into being amid the release of massive primordial cataclysms. Conception occurs at the primal level. I’m not being facetious when I stress, throughout this book, that it is better to be primitive than to be sophisticated, and better to be stupid than to be smart. The most highly cultured mother gives birth sweating and dislocated and cursing like a sailor. That’s the place we inhabit as artists and innovators. It’s the place we must become comfortable with. The hospital room may be spotless and sterile, but birth itself will always take place amid chaos, pain, and blood.
”
”
Steven Pressfield (Do the Work)
“
I knew that we counted little in comparison with the universe, I knew that we were nothing; but to be so immeasurably nothing seems in some way both to overwhelm and at the same time to reassure. Those figures, those dimensions beyond the range of human thought, are utterly overpowering. Is there anything whatsoever to which we can cling? Amid that chaos of illusions into which we are cast headlong, there is one thing that stands out as true, and that is---love. All the rest is nothingness, an empty void. We peer down into a huge dark abyss. And we are afraid.
”
”
Julien Green (Personal record, 1928-1939)
“
Gliding across an imaginary line that splits the Pacific Ocean from the north to the south polar caps, the sunrise acquired a new label, June 23. Behind that line, June 22 had just dawned. This murky international convention, amid world chaos, still stood. For the globe still turned as always in the light of the sun, ninety million miles away in black space, and the tiny dwellers on the globe still had to agree, as they went about their mutual butcheries, on a way to tell the time.
”
”
Herman Wouk (The Winds of War (The Henry Family, #1))
“
but in disasters, people react differently. It’s not uncommon for people to focus on one thing they can control amid a sea of chaos and hyperfocus on that one thing.
”
”
Mike Bockoven (FantasticLand)
“
Our generation needs an approach for overcoming obstacles and thriving amid chaos more than ever. One that will help turn our problems on their heads, using them as canvases on which to paint master works.
”
”
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
“
Jake, our fearless leader. On a crazed kamikaze mission. I’d never seen him like this. Even in our lowest moments, he’d always been steady. Resolute. He weighed the costs, made a decision, forged ahead.
And I’d always wondered how he did it. How he kept it straight in his mind. Yeerks. Visser One. Aliens conquering humans, conquering the planet. Fighting the enemy without becoming like them. How did he sort through all that? The emotions, the ethical dilemmas, the moral crises? How did he wrap his brain around it all so he could make logical decisions? Smart decisions. The kind that saved the lives of his team. The kind that set the enemy back a small step or two.
But now I knew.
Jake didn’t understand any of it better than the rest of us did. If he defeated the Yeerks, freed humanity, rescued Earth, that was good. But that was just a bonus. His main goal was much simpler. To save his family. That goal was what had given him strength. That goal was what had kept him sane. Allowed him to retain a center of calm focus amid the awful chaos.
His family.
”
”
Katherine Applegate (The Diversion (Animorphs, #49))
“
The darker side of the City tried to emphasize the selfish parts of me by encouraging my sense of entitlement and my desire for personal space. But God seemed to whisper that the alternative existed: to let Him grow humility and concern for others in a way I had never experienced, to live out His peace amid whirling chaos. (p.67)
”
”
Tara Leigh Cobble (Crowded Skies: Letters To Manhattan)
“
Then the storm came swiftly, first falling from the heavens, then doubly falling in torrents from the mountains and washing loud down the roads and stone ditches; with it came a dark, frightening sky and savage filaments of lightning and world-splitting thunder, while ragged, destroying clouds fled along past the hotel. Mountains and lake disappeared - the hotel crouched amid tumult, chaos and darkness.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
“
Things that remind me of Mother are these:
the truth ‘mid deception, a warm summer breeze,
the calm within chaos, a stitch in a rip,
a comforting blanket, the smile on her lip,
an ocean of love in a heart big as whales,
the morals in everyday stories she tells,
a wink amid laughter, the wisdom in books,
the peace in humility, beauty in looks,
the light and the life in a ray of the sun,
the hard work accomplished disguised as pure fun,
concern in a handclasp, encouragement too,
the hope in a clear morning sky azure blue,
the power in prayers uttered soft and sincere,
the faith in a promise, and joy in a tear.
These things all attest to the wonder and grace
of my precious mother, none else could replace.
”
”
Richelle E. Goodrich (Slaying Dragons: Quotes, Poetry, & a Few Short Stories for Every Day of the Year)
“
The thing is, Jesus was the ultimate embracer of chaos. He preached and taught and shepherded a flock, and in the midst of his tumultuous ministry, he accepted everyone. Everyone was allowed to join in on the love. The widows, the prostitutes, the lepers, the orphans, people with great need, people who brought drama and stress into his life, and folks who weren’t always lovable or even kind. Furthermore, Jesus told us to love them too. He didn’t ask us kindly or say, “Hey guys, maybe you could . . .” No, he straight up called us to stand with the oppressed. Jesus looked at them and said, “Bring it on.” Jesus took in the messy, broken pieces and said, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5 WEB). Amid our chaos, fear, and frustration there is the reminder, “For everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” (Eccl. 3:1 WEB, emphasis added).
”
”
Rachel Hollis (Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are so You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be (Girl, Wash Your Face Series))
“
A shift lasts twelve hours. Twelve hours of holding a few lives in my hands, trying to make order out of the chaos of bodies and disease, working within a health care system that sometimes forgets it exists to serve human beings rather than bureaucrats or businessmen. Amid the many uncertainties of the shift there is one thing I know for sure. Am I ready and up to the job? Yes. Today, and every day, for the sake of my patients I have no other option; the answer has to be, and always is, Yes.
”
”
Theresa Brown (The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives)
“
How such Ideals do realize themselves; and grow, wondrously, from amid the incongruous ever-fluctuating chaos of the Actual: this is what World-History, if it teach any thing, has to teach us, How they grow; and, after long stormy growth, bloom out mature, supreme; then quickly (for the blossom is brief) fall into decay; sorrowfully dwindle; and crumble down, or rush down, noisily or noiselessly disappearing. The blossom is so brief; as of some centennial Cactus-flower, which after a century of waiting shines out for hours!
”
”
Thomas Carlyle (The French Revolution: A History)
“
Amid the turmoil and tumult of battle, there may be seeming disorder and yet no real disorder at all; amid confusion and chaos, your array may be without head or tail, yet it will be proof against defeat.
”
”
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
“
The mountain seems no more a soulless thing,
But rather as a shape of ancient fear,
In darkness and the winds of Chaos born
Amid the lordless heavens' thundering-
A Presence crouched, enormous and austere,
Before whose feet the mighty waters mourn.
”
”
George Sterling
“
For a moment, disconnected by the stitch in his side, he listened not to the sense but to the interplay of the two flexible voices, one masculine and light, one mellow and feminine, unreeling their story, faintly affronted amid mounting hysteria. He opened his eyes.
He knew, because his memories of Francis Crawford went back further than those of anyone there, that Lymond was rather drunk, although he could still disguise it. The quick-wittedness, the invention, the faultless comedy timing were present at the price of a little concentration which had closed his outer consciousness for the moment. Jerott, no longer laughing, sat in the shadows and watched the dazzling performance and both the players, blond and brown, artist and acolyte.
Acolyte. But Philippa was a child no longer: he had known that since that single evening in Lyon. The severe, clear-skinned profile turned towards Francis might have belonged to any great lady. The brown and brilliant gaze only quizzed him at intervals: she seemed able, Jerott saw, to sense by instinct the course of his fantasy; and as with Lymond, what she was doing at present occupied all her awareness. Then Francis surged to his feet, leaving his robe, and launched into Jason’s querulous tour de force, fractured by interruptions and a mounting fury of incoherent resentment, and finally disintegrating in chaos.
”
”
Dorothy Dunnett (Checkmate (The Lymond Chronicles, #6))
“
Islamism has become the “go-to” haven for those seeking order amid such chaos. Sharia courts have been established in these countries, filling the void of social control. After the savagery of dictatorship and civil war, the promise of divine law is understandably welcomed by a population hungry for order and stability. When the Islamists come to town, they therefore reestablish order again with their own savagery. For example, the immodest woman is no longer considered simply immodest; she is an adulterous sinner who must be flogged and stoned.
”
”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights)
“
I knew that we counted little in comparison with the universe, I knew that we were nothing; but to be so immeasurably nothing seems in some way both to overwhelm and at the same time to reassure. Those figures, those dimensions beyond the range of human thought, are utterly overpowering. Is there anything whatsoever to which we can cling? Amid that chaos of illusions into which we are cast headlong, there is one thing that stands out as true, and that is—love. All the rest is nothingness, an empty void. We peer down into a huge dark abyss. And we are afraid.”54
”
”
Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom)
“
What makes a person "the same" person across life's tectonic upheavals of circumstance and character? Amid the chaos and decay toward which the universe inclines, we grasp for stability and permanence by trying to carve out a solid sense of self in our blink of existence. But there is no solidity. Every quark of every atom of every cell in your body had been replaced since the time of your first conscious memory, your first word, your first kiss. In the act of living, you come to dream different dreams, value different values, love different loves. In a sense, you are reborn with each new experience.
”
”
Maria Popova (Figuring)
“
How sad to be lying now on a sick bed, and to be in danger of dying! This world is pleasant–it would be dreary to be called from it, and to have to go who knows where?"
And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all around an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood–the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth: and it shuddered at the thought of tottering , and plunging amid that chaos.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
“
But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come,
And what I saw, the hallowed, my word shall convey,
For she, she herself, who is older than the ages
And higher than the gods of Orient and Occident,
Nature has now awoken amid the clang of arms,
And from high Aether down to the low abyss,
According to fixed law, begotten, as in the past, on holy Chaos,
Delight, the all-creative,
Delights in self-renewal.
”
”
Friedrich Hölderlin (Selected Poems and Fragments)
“
But we live in a world that has lost its appreciation for small things. We live in a world that wants things bigger and bigger. We want to supersize our fries, sodas, and church buildings. But amid all the supersizing, many of us feel God doing something new, something small and subtle. This thing Jesus called the kingdom of God is emerging across the globe in the most unexpected places, a gentle whisper amid the chaos.
”
”
Shane Claiborne (The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical)
“
However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. Even a crisis, such as the periodic large asteroids that have crashed into the Earth, although increasing chaos temporarily, end up increasing—deepening—the
”
”
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology)
“
One thing mental illness taught me is that progress is a matter of acceptance. Only by accepting a situation can you change it. You have to learn not to be shocked by the shock. Not to be in a state of panic about the panic. To change what you can change and not get frustrated by what you can’t. There is no panacea, or utopia, there is just love and kindness and trying, amid the chaos, to make things better where we can. And to keep our minds wide, wide open in a world that often wants to close them.
”
”
Matt Haig (Notes on a Nervous Planet)
“
However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. Even a crisis, such as the periodic large asteroids that have crashed into the Earth, although increasing chaos temporarily, end up increasing—deepening—the order created by biological evolution.
”
”
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology)
“
Coronavirus conspiracies, promising access to forbidden truths others did not hold, let believers feel certainty and autonomy amid a crisis that had taken away both. By pinning it all on some villain or plot, they gave a senseless tragedy some degree of meaning, however dark. And they offered users a way to take action, first by sharing their secret knowledge with others, then by telling one another that they would band together against whatever culprit the conspiracy blamed. The overarching narrative—coronavirus is a plot by Them to control Us—was everywhere
”
”
Max Fisher (The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World)
“
The same trend is noticeable in the scientific realm: research here is for its own sake far more than for the partial and fragmentary results it achieves; here we see an ever more rapid succession of unfounded theories and hypotheses, no sooner set up than crumbling to give way to others that will have an even shorter life - a veritable chaos amid which one would search in vain for anything definitive, unless it be a monstrous accumulation of facts and details incapable of proving or signifying anything. We refer here of course to speculative science, insofar as this still exists; in applied science there are on the contrary undeniable results, and this is easily understandable since these results bear directly on the domain of matter.
”
”
René Guénon (The Crisis of the Modern World)
“
The lambs in their arms were as smooth as mushrooms, the flock at their heels unruffled. And amid all that froth of fleece, white and metrical as soap-suds, there was no sign of a black lamb.
What more could one ask, at a children’s Christmas Eve service? Yet I found that I did indeed want more, especially for the children’s sake—faces trodden by crows’-feet, signs of the ferment, one might almost say chaos, that this unprecedented event brought once and ever brings; something of life, even in carven faces, someone out of breath with running, someone stricken with joy.
And I dearly wanted a black lamb. For, without him, where are the ninety and nine? Flocks, like families, have need of their black sheep—he carries their sorrow for them. He is the other side of their whiteness. Does nobody understand, I wondered, that a crib without a black lamb is an incomplete statement?
”
”
P.L. Travers (The Fox at the Manger)
“
I wondered if we would have to choose music for his funeral or would we get to celebrate his high school graduation, his wedding, or even his next birthday."
"I needed to focus on the daily victories without peering too far ahead to a potential dismal future for my beautiful boy."
"God didn’t do this to us, but I do know He was using it for His glory."
"Yes, there has been loss, but right behind it come gifts we would never have expected amid such trials: peace in the midst of chaos, joy within sorrow, and even a path of light surrounded by darkness."
"I was not happy, but still, I had a great deal of joy."
"When I focus on all He has given me, it’s difficult to see what I don’t have."
"As uncomfortable as I often am through this journey, I welcome the chance to honor God through it."
"I am so thankful God meets us where we are, then walks us the rest of the way."
"While I wholeheartedly believed God would put the pieces back together, I also knew He might not put them together the same way they were before.
”
”
Christina Custodio (When God Changed His Mind)
“
Donne loved the trans- prefix: it's scattered everywhere across his writing—'transpose', 'translate', 'transport', 'transubstantiate'. In this Latin preposition—'across, to the other side of, over, beyond'—he saw both the chaos and potential of us. We are, he believed, creatures born transformable. He knew of transformation into misery: 'But O, self-traitor, I do bring/The spider love, which transubstantiates all/And can convert manna to gall'— but also the transformation achieved by beautiful women: 'Us she informed, but transubstantiates you'.
And then there was the transformation of himself: from failure and penury, to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age; one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you. Because amid all Donne's reinventions, there was a constant running through his life and work: he remained steadfast in his belief that we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle.
”
”
Katherine Rundell (Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne)
“
And so being a Negro in America is not a comfortable existence. It means being a part of the company of the bruised, the battered, the scarred and the defeated. Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan. Being a Negro in America means listening to suburban politicians talk eloquently against open housing while arguing in the same breath that they are not racists. It means being harried by day and haunted by night by a nagging sense of nobodyness and constantly fighting to be saved from the poison of bitterness. It means the ache and anguish of living in so many situations where hopes unborn have died.
After 348 years racial injustice is still the Negro’s burden and America’s shame.
”
”
Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?)
“
Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God’s control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato’s cosmology, noös or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity—or blind chance, according to some experts—into submission. Noös happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noös imposes order (although how this “persuading” is done Plato nowhere says). According to Fat, my friend’s cancer consisted of disorder not yet persuaded into sentient shape. Noös or God had not yet gotten around to her, to which I said, “Well, when he did get around to her it was too late.” Fat had no answer for that, at least in terms of oral rebuttal. Probably he sneaked off and wrote about it in his journal. He stayed up to four A.M. every night scratching away in his journal. I suppose all the secrets of the universe lay in it somewhere amid the rubble.
”
”
Philip K. Dick (The Valis Trilogy)
“
At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted.
I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were being garrotted by invisible cords, I floundered in anguish and dread, oppressively ridden by the most unbridled nightmares. A whole series of monsters and avatars swarmed in the shadows, coming to life amid draughts of sulphur and phosphorus like an animated fresco painted on the moving wall of sleep.
There followed a turbulent race through space. I soared, grasped by the hair by an invisible hand of will: an icy and powerful hand, in which I felt the hardness of precious stones, and which I sensed to be the hand of Ethal. Dizziness was piled upon dizziness in that flight to the abyss, under skies the colour of camphor and salt, skies whose nocturnal brilliance had a terrible limpidity. I was spun around and around, in bewildering confusion, above deserts and rivers. Great expanses of sand stretched into the distance, mottled here and there by monumental shadows. At times we would pass over cities: sleeping cities with obelisks and cupolas shining milk-white in the moonlight, between metallic palm-trees. In the extreme distance, amid bamboos and flowering mangroves, luminous millennial pagodas descended towards the water on stepped terraces.
”
”
Jean Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas)
“
I am a puny part of the great whole. Yes; but all animals condemned to live, All sentient things, born by the same stern law, Suffer like me, and like me also die. The vulture fastens on his timid prey, And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs: All’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while An eagle tears the vulture into shreds; The eagle is transfixed by shafts of man; The man, prone in the dust of battlefields, Mingling his blood with dying fellow men, Becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds. Thus the whole world in every member groans, All born for torment and for mutual death. And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say The ills of each make up the good of all! What blessedness! And as, with quaking voice, Mortal and pitiful ye cry, “All’s well,” The universe belies you, and your heart Refutes a hundred times your mind’s conceit. . . . What is the verdict of the vastest mind? Silence: the book of fate is closed to us. Man is a stranger to his own research; He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes. Tormented atoms in a bed of mud, Devoured by death, a mockery of fate; But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes, Guided by thoughts, have measured the faint stars. Our being mingles with the infinite; Ourselves we never see, or come to know. This world, this theatre of pride and wrong, Swarms with sick fools who talk of happiness. . . . Once did I sing, in less lugubrious tone, The sunny ways of pleasure’s general rule; The times have changed, and, taught by growing age, And sharing of the frailty of mankind, Seeking a light amid the deepening gloom, I can but suffer, and will not repine.50
”
”
Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)
“
The Monk in the Kitchen
I
ORDER is a lovely thing;
On disarray it lays its wing,
Teaching simplicity to sing.
It has a meek and lowly grace,
Quiet as a nun's face.
Lo—I will have thee in this place!
Tranquil well of deep delight,
All things that shine through thee appear
As stones through water, sweetly clear.
Thou clarity,
That with angelic charity
Revealest beauty where thou art,
Spread thyself like a clean pool.
Then all the things that in thee are,
Shall seem more spiritual and fair,
Reflection from serener air—
Sunken shapes of many a star
In the high heavens set afar.
II
Ye stolid, homely, visible things,
Above you all brood glorious wings
Of your deep entities, set high,
Like slow moons in a hidden sky.
But you, their likenesses, are spent
Upon another element.
Truly ye are but seemings—
The shadowy cast-oft gleamings
Of bright solidities. Ye seem
Soft as water, vague as dream;
Image, cast in a shifting stream.
III
What are ye?
I know not.
Brazen pan and iron pot,
Yellow brick and gray flag-stone
That my feet have trod upon—
Ye seem to me
Vessels of bright mystery.
For ye do bear a shape, and so
Though ye were made by man, I know
An inner Spirit also made,
And ye his breathings have obeyed.
IV
Shape, the strong and awful Spirit,
Laid his ancient hand on you.
He waste chaos doth inherit;
He can alter and subdue.
Verily, he doth lift up
Matter, like a sacred cup.
Into deep substance he reached, and lo
Where ye were not, ye were; and so
Out of useless nothing, ye
Groaned and laughed and came to be.
And I use you, as I can,
Wonderful uses, made for man,
Iron pot and brazen pan.
V
What are ye?
I know not;
Nor what I really do
When I move and govern you.
There is no small work unto God.
He required of us greatness;
Of his least creature
A high angelic nature,
Stature superb and bright completeness.
He sets to us no humble duty.
Each act that he would have us do
Is haloed round with strangest beauty;
Terrific deeds and cosmic tasks
Of his plainest child he asks.
When I polish the brazen pan
I hear a creature laugh afar
In the gardens of a star,
And from his burning presence run
Flaming wheels of many a sun.
Whoever makes a thing more bright,
He is an angel of all light.
When I cleanse this earthen floor
My spirit leaps to see
Bright garments trailing over it,
A cleanness made by me.
Purger of all men's thoughts and ways,
With labor do I sound Thy praise,
My work is done for Thee.
Whoever makes a thing more bright,
He is an angel of all light.
Therefore let me spread abroad
The beautiful cleanness of my God.
VI
One time in the cool of dawn
Angels came and worked with me.
The air was soft with many a wing.
They laughed amid my solitude
And cast bright looks on everything.
Sweetly of me did they ask
That they might do my common task
And all were beautiful—but one
With garments whiter than the sun
Had such a face
Of deep, remembered grace;
That when I saw I cried—"Thou art
The great Blood-Brother of my heart.
Where have I seen thee?"—And he said,
"When we are dancing round God's throne,
How often thou art there.
Beauties from thy hands have flown
Like white doves wheeling in mid air.
Nay—thy soul remembers not?
Work on, and cleanse thy iron pot.
”
”
Anna Hempstead Branch
“
It's like playing an instrument. It's like dancing," she says simply. Her house looks like the aftermath of a personalized earthquake visited by a vengeful god, but even here, amid such disturbing chaos, what Kim has elegantly just confirmed is the profound power of sequence; the beauty of order. Heartbeat, breath, ebb tide, flood tide, the movements of the earth, the phases of the moon, seasons, ritual, call and response, notes in a scale, words in a sentence. Human connection and security lie here.
”
”
Sarah Krasnostein (The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster)
“
These two laws in particular were central to Jewish identity in Paul’s day. They had become social badges of honor to distinguish Jews from Gentiles, something concrete to hang on to amid the persistent religious chaos introduced by centuries of Greek and Roman ways. That’s why I wear my Yankees jersey in Phillies country. I do it, at great risk to myself, to let the world—the world, mind you—know that I am different. I belong to another tribe. I am special.
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Peter Enns (How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That's Great News)
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They didn’t understand that you had to be cynical to maintain your sanity amid the mad and pointless chaos.
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Jesper Bugge Kold (Winter Men)
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I encourage you to sit by some flowers and listen to the bees buzzing. The frequency, vibrations, and energy of all life are in their sound.
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Jon Wall (How To Retrain Your Human: A Path To Peace Amid the Chaos of Human Life)
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In war, we see the ultimate expression of ungodly utilitarianism. War is supremely practical. It is the willingness to sacrifice literally everything to achieve a goal…Worship, however, is the opposite of war. It is an act of creation rather than destruction, of order rather than chaos, and beauty rather than ugliness...Art is more than a luxury, and beauty is more than an extravagance. When we create art and music, or when we gather to worship with expressions of splendor and adoration...we are performing an act of defiance. We are creating an oasis of beauty amid the dehumanizing ugliness of our world. We are declaring our refusal to succumb to the brutal practicality of the world, which crushes people in its pursuit of power, wealth, or fame.
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Skye Jethani (What If Jesus Was Serious about the Church?: A Visual Guide to Becoming the Community Jesus Intended)
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Reconstructing family life amid the chaos of the cotton revolution was no easy matter. Under the best of circumstances, the slave family on the frontier was extraordinarily unstable because the frontier plantation was extraordinarily unstable. For every aspiring master who climbed into the planter class, dozens failed because of undercapitalization, unproductive land, insect infestation, bad weather, or sheer incompetence. Others, discouraged by low prices and disdainful of the primitive conditions, simply gave up and returned home. Those who succeeded often did so only after they had failed numerous times. Each failure or near-failure caused slaves to be sold, shattering families and scattering husbands and wives, parents and children. Success, moreover, was no guarantee of security for slaves. Disease and violence struck down some of the most successful planters. Not even longevity assured stability, as many successful planters looked west for still greater challenges. Whatever the source, the chronic volatility of the plantation took its toll on the domestic life of slaves.
Despite these difficulties, the family became the center of slave life in the interior, as it was on the seaboard. From the slaves' perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or mechanic but husband or wife, son or daughter - the precise opposite of their owners' calculation. As in Virginia and the Carolinas, the family became the locus of socialization, education, governance, and vocational training. Slave families guided courting patterns, marriage rituals, child-rearing practices, and the division of domestic labor in Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond. Sally Anne Chambers, who grew up in Louisiana, recalled how slaves turned to the business of family on Saturdays and Sundays. 'De women do dey own washing den. De menfolks tend to de gardens round dey own house. Dey raise some cotton and sell it to massa and git li'l money dat way.'
As Sally Anne Chambers's memories reveal, the reconstructed slave family was more than a source of affection. It was a demanding institution that defined responsibilities and enforced obligations, even as it provided a source of succor. Parents taught their children that a careless word in the presence of the master or mistress could spell disaster. Children and the elderly, not yet or no longer laboring in the masters' fields, often worked in the slaves' gardens and grounds, as did new arrivals who might be placed in the household of an established family. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, was accepted into his new family but only when he agreed to contribute all of his overwork 'earnings into the family stock.'
The 'family stock' reveals how the slaves' economy undergirded the slave family in the southern interior, just as it had on the seaboard. As slaves gained access to gardens and grounds, overwork, or the sale of handicraft, they began trading independently and accumulating property. The material linkages of sellers and buyers - the bartering of goods and labor among themselves - began to knit slaves together into working groups that were often based on familial connections. Before long, systems of ownership and inheritance emerged, joining men and women together on a foundation of need as well as affection.
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Ira Berlin (Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves)
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Truth is?
Sometimes amid all the chaos you've got to walk into the fire whether you like it or not because there's a better world out there waiting for you to help make it.
Stand up.
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R.M. Engelhardt (R A W POEMS R.M. ENGELHARDT)
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Happiness happens in hours Achieving tranquility amid the frenzy of modern life is challenging. It is certainly more challenging than basic time-management matters, such as figuring out how long it will take to
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Laura Vanderkam (Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters)
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Amid chaos, there is also opportunity.
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Sophie Lark (Brutal Prince (Brutal Birthright, #1))
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The way of love will show us the right thing to do, every single time. It is moral and spiritual grounding—and a place of rest—amid the chaos that is often part of life. It’s how we stay decent in indecent times. Loving is not always easy, but like with muscles, we get stronger both with repetition and as the burden gets heavier. And it works.
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Michael B. Curry (Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times)
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Living organisms have adapted to life in a turbulent world. Wings, fins, skin, scales, the shapes of bodies and cells, these are all giveaway signs of adaptation to turbulence. Amid chaos, life finds a way.
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Janie Kim (We Carry the Sea in Our Hands)
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God rewards faith. He rewards the day-to-day faith that expresses itself in obedience and righteous living. He rewards the sacrificial faith that is demonstrated through service and outreach. He rewards the dangerous faith that doesn’t compromise, even when the consequences may be harsh.
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Amir Tsarfati (Discovering Daniel: Finding Our Hope in God's Prophetic Plan Amid Global Chaos)
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She much preferred the world within her skull to the one before her feet. She lived beneath the pages of a story, between the heartbeats of a song. Her eyes were globes amid a galaxy held together by fantastical chaos. Wherever she was, it wasn't here. Humanity saw her as stone. She saw humanity as a collection of letters scattered upon a page, nonsensical and quite boring indeed.
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Andrea Michelle (Kalopsia: The Best Contemporary, Modern Poetry for Young People for Free!)
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difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions. The run-up to the war is particularly significant because it also laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed, and that constitutes the major subject of this book. While the Bush administration—and especially Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and L. Paul Bremer III—bear much of the responsibility for the mishandling of the occupation in 2003 and early 2004, blame also must rest with the leadership of the U.S. military, who didn’t prepare the U.S. Army for the challenge it faced, and then wasted a year by using counterproductive tactics that were employed in unprofessional ignorance of the basic tenets of counter-insurgency warfare. The undefeated Saddam Hussein of 1991 The 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq can’t be viewed in isolation. The chain of events began more than a decade earlier with the botched close of the 1991 Gulf War and then it continued in the U.S. effort to contain Saddam Hussein in the years that followed.
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Thomas E. Ricks (Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005)
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relatively powerless—the front-line American soldier doing his best in a difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions. The run-up to the war is particularly significant because it also laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed, and that constitutes the
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Thomas E. Ricks (Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005)
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When the heavy gate finally swings open, Dylan, the boys, and about a dozen other children race directly to their favorite spots, although it’s hard to see how they navigate so expertly amid the chaos. “Is this a junkyard?” asks my 5-year-old son, Gideon, who has come with me to visit.
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Anonymous
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While the secessionists in Jubaland have continued to contest their rights to secede amid enduring opposition from Mogadishu, today, both Somaliland and Puntland are in fact independent states. Neither the African Union (AU) nor the United Nations (UN) have so far formally granted the crucial recognition desperately sought by each of the secessionist enclaves. The main problem is that the majority of member nations at both the AU and UN (including veto-holding China, one of the few remaining land empires) are stoutly indifferent to the idea of secession for fear that similar political demands could materialize and affect politics within their own borders.1 Despite the international opposition, ironically Somaliland has earned a good repute among its local and international observers as being under a more effective government than the other regions of the country, including the decimated and hapless Transitional Government based in Mogadishu. This is regardless of Somaliland’s extreme condition of poverty.2 An AU mission that visited the separatist northern territory in 2006 raised the hope of recognition of Somaliland, but the favorable report of that mission was not followed through on by the AU’s governing Heads of States. The AU “refused to recognize Somaliland’s independence, citing the maxim that there would be chaos if colonial boundaries were not observed.
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Raphael Chijioke Njoku (The History of Somalia (The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations))
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Amid increasing chaos, here lay the potential dominants. Much action and the play of forces even on a huge scale and with enormous material effects is often irrelevant, and counts for little or nothing in the final result: but along the chain of commanding causation even the smallest events are vital. It is these which should be studied and pondered over; for in them is revealed the profound significance of human choice and the sublime responsibility of men. No one can tell that he may not some day set a stone rolling or take or neglect some ordinary step which in its consequences will alter the history of the world.
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Winston S. Churchill (The World Crisis Vol 2: 1915)
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She much preferred the world within her skull to the one before her feet. She lived beneath the pages of a story, between the heartbeats of a song. Her eyes were globes amid a galaxy held together by fantastical chaos. Wherever she was, it wasn't here. Humanity saw her as stone. She saw humanity as a collection of letters scattered upon a page, nonsensical and quite boring indeed.
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Andrea Michelle (Kalopsia: The Best Contemporary, Modern Poetry for Young People for Free!)
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Many coping strategies have a Zen simplicity. Instead of resolving chaos, find beauty and happiness amid chaos. I am reminded of a friend who said that when she found out her husband couldn’t fill her needs, she changed her needs;
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Andrew Solomon (Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity)
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The emergency services had not yet been organized.
Rosine could go where she wished. Her high heels made her stumble in the darkness, over the stones, the frozen clods of soil, over the tussocks of grass, the countless obstacles of the rough earth. She was shivering with cold and thought she might be about to faint away amid the sinister din of the disaster.
A fearful chaos was becoming apparent. Rude forms stood erect, the silhouette of a heap of rails. Lanterns, miserable yellow stars, circulated hither and thither. There were even household oil-lamps to be seen, with which the wind dealt harshly. And, all the time, people were running ...
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Maurice Renard (Hands of Orlac)
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Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter and founder of Square, has an interesting approach to his weekly routine. He has divided up his week into themes. Monday is for management meetings and “running the company” work. Tuesday is for product development. Wednesday is for marketing, communications, and growth. Thursday is for developers and partnerships. Friday is for the company and its culture.9 This routine helps to provide calmness amid the chaos of a high-growth start-up. It enables him to focus his energy on a single theme each day instead of feeling pulled into everything. He adheres to this routine each week, no exceptions, and over time people learn this about him and can organize meetings and requests around it. TACKLE
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Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
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I’d kept it as a token of her goodness. A reminder that amid all the death and chaos, a light existed somewhere in the world. Some days, that light had been the only thing that’d kept my soul intact.
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Ana Huang (Twisted Lies (Twisted, #4))
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But what we do see with Daniel and his friends was that despite not understanding God’s plan, they still trusted that He had one.
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Amir Tsarfati (Discovering Daniel: Finding Our Hope in God's Prophetic Plan Amid Global Chaos)
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I’d kept it as a token of her goodness. A reminder that amid all the death and chaos, a light existed somewhere in the world.
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Ana Huang (Twisted Lies (Twisted, #4))
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A bud vase stood upon the dresser amid the candles. It contained a single rose, and it appeared to be silver in color. I drew nearer. Yes, it was real, not artificial. And it was silver. In what shadow did such flowers grow?
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Roger Zelazny (Sign of Chaos (The Chronicles of Amber, #8))
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Maybe it is better to stay connected to each other in the unknown or the mystical. To request a piece of something solid be absorbed into us so we can never forget from whence we came. This keeps us rooted in history and the humanness that can get lost in the modern world. It's a hands-to-the-earth practice that lets each of us be free in the not knowing. It's not ignorance, it's faith and some measure of innocent that allows us to suspend belief in our current world -- a port amid the chaos.
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Athena Dixon (The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays)
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Her greatest power didn’t come from repose, but from passion. She performed miracles amid chaos.
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C.M. Raymond (Reawakening (Kurtherian Gambit: The Rise of Magic, #2))
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As brainstorming rose in popularity, academic researchers started to question if it worked. Was brainstorming in groups the most effective way to generate ideas? For decades researchers ran studies in which they compared the creative output of brainstorming groups against the creative output of the same number of individuals generating ideas alone. Study after study found that the individuals generating ideas alone outperformed the brainstorming groups. Individuals generated more ideas, more diverse ideas, and more original ideas.38 As researchers dug into why individuals outperformed groups, they identified four mitigating factors. First, research has found that people tend to work harder when working individually than when working in groups. This is called social loafing. When we are on our own, we have no choice but to put in the work, whereas when we are in a group, we can rely on the efforts of others. Second, brainstorming groups exhibited many of the common challenges associated with group conformity. The early ideas set the tone for later ideas. Ideas were often too conservative or similar to each other. Members censored their ideas due to concerns about how others would judge their ideas. Third, brainstorming groups ran into challenges with production blocking—that’s a fancy term for a simple idea. Have you ever been about to say something when someone else jumped in, prompting you to forget what you were going to say? That’s production blocking. In group brainstorming sessions, people lose ideas amid the chaos of everyone sharing ideas in rapid succession. And finally, the fourth factor is a common group trait known as downward norm setting—the performance of the group tends to be limited to the lowest-performing member. Rather than the strongest member raising everyone else up, the opposite happens. The weakest member brings everyone else down. These factors combined to inhibit the performance of the brainstorming groups as compared to the individuals who generated ideas alone.39
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Teresa Torres (Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value)
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I wondered if we would have to choose music for his funeral or would we get to celebrate his high school graduation, his wedding, or even his next birthday
I needed to focus on the daily victories without peering too far ahead to a potential dismal future for my beautiful boy.
God didn’t do this to us, but I do know He was using it for His glory.
Yes, there has been loss, but right behind it come gifts we would never have expected amid such trials: peace in the midst of chaos, joy within sorrow, and even a path of light surrounded by darkness.
I was not happy, but still, I had a great deal of joy.
When I focus on all He has given me, it’s difficult to see what I don’t have.
As uncomfortable as I often am through this journey, I welcome the chance to honor God through it.
I am so thankful God meets us where we are, then walks us the rest of the way.
While I wholeheartedly believed God would put the pieces back together, I also knew He might not put them together the same way they were before.
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Christina Custodio (When God Changed His Mind)
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Moving through the world of French academic science, Libchaber rose in his profession, his brilliance never questioned. His colleagues did sometimes think he was a little crazy—a Jewish mystic amid the rationalists, a Gaullist where most scientists were Communists. They joked about his Great Man theory of history, his fixation on Goethe, his obsession with old books. He had hundreds of original editions of works by scientists, some dating back to the 1600s. He read them not as historical curiosities but as a source of fresh ideas about the nature of reality, the same reality he was probing with his lasers and his high-technology refrigeration coils.
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James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
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The town would blink away quietly, forgotten to the world amid the chaos and light.
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Brendan Ritchie (Eta Draconis)
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Here, in these edge times, we may join in reweaving the beautiful, life-giving tapestry of Earth and soul.
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Leah Rampy (Earth and Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos)
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Amid all the chaos, Joseph Ashburn returned safely from his latest voyage. While he and other men worked hard to clean up the mess the British had left behind, Betsy kept sewing. Along with flags, she sewed military supplies
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James Buckley Jr. (Who Was Betsy Ross?)
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Akathisia's stygian abyss, where immeasurable restlessness tears the matrix of the psyche apart, is where beauty, love, and resilience find their most resolute expression. Even though Akathisia makes the body a puppet to an unseen puppeteer and the soul a vessel adrift in turbulent seas, human strength is the ability to find grace amidst chaos, cultivate love in desolate landscapes, and summon resilience in the face of despair and deterioration. Thus, amid mental and physical anguish, humanity's indomitable spirit transforms suffering into a crucible that yields a transcendent understanding of beauty, love, and the will to overcome. We become wise, compassionate, and resilient through suffering in this crucible.
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Jonathan Harnisch
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Parenthood is serving the peanuts amid turbulence. Then when real trouble hits—when life brings our family death, divorce, bankruptcy, illness—parenthood is looking at little faces and knowing that we are as afraid as they are. Parenthood is thinking: This is too much. I cannot lead them. But I will do the thing I cannot do. So we sit down next to our babies. We turn their faces toward ours until they are looking away from the chaos and directly into our eyes. We take their hands in ours. We say to them, “Look at me. It’s you and me. I am here. This is more real than anything out there. You and me. We will hold hands and breathe and love each other. Even if we are falling from the sky.” Family is: Whether we’re falling or flying, we’re going to take care of each other through the whole damn ride.
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Glennon Doyle (Untamed)
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All at once the fairies burst from their corner, lit brighter than a galaxy. The elders darted straight to the captives. But the younger pixies, led by Tinker Bell, zipped and darted around the pirates, sprinkling enough pixie dust to spark.
Enough pixie dust, that was, to burn.
"We're on fire!" Smee shouted. "Run for the water!"
"The boy will escape!" Hook snarled. "You'll all be staying right here!"
The pirate crew wanted to obey their captain, of course--- but the fairies were relentless. And their dust rained down like acid. Tink found that the unease that came from always trying to contain her outsized feelings was greatly alleviated with this opportunity to expend some of that wild, raw emotion. It was thrilling. She threw her head back, laughing as the crew retreated.
Then it was just Tink, Hook, and Peter. The Darlings and Lost Boys had been released by the elders. Peter was still strung up, bobbing in his restraints like a kite. Amid the chaos he looked at Tinker Bell with amusement.
"Came back for us, did ya?" His eyes twinkled.
I came back... for me.
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Elizabeth Lim (A Twisted Tale Anthology)
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Serenity is inner peace amid chaos and trouble, not their absence.
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Shree Shambav (Journey of Soul - Karma)
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There really were rabbits everywhere. They’d whoosh and bound past you in the blink of an eye, sometimes so fast that all you’d hear was the rapid thump thump on the ground before they were gone. They were as quick as the wind, and the only thing you really ever saw was their shadows as they skittered by.
What impression did this give to us? Did it suggest the land was alive, vital and strong? Did it convey a sense of chaos, confusion and clamour? No, quite the opposite in fact, for the land seemed ever so silent. Indeed, I don’t know what other animal could’ve been as quiet as those wild rabbits.
Although the wilderness was generally quiet, it took the appearance of the rabbits before you would become acutely aware of how quiet it really was. It was a sereneness that seemed more illusory than anything else - a type of nothingness, nothing but the wind and the grass, a rippling expanse that gifted a sense of kindness, the drifting clouds, thoughts dim and hazy.
The instant the rabbits appeared, all of this nature awoke, the horizon suddenly shrank, and the air grew taut, ever so slightly. My heart followed suit, and so did my ears. My throat was empty, and all I could do was utter a gentle ah.
That sound, let loose, became the most solid, most compact thing in the entire world. My body felt heavy, overwhelmingly so, and I was unable to move. But the rabbits bounded in front of me, racing back and forth, their gracefulness blending into the calmness of the land. Then another appeared, hopped up on a largish stone and stood motionless, its eyes directed towards me, peering into me. The silence of the scene increased tenfold. One more rabbit jumped into view and the quiet deepened yet again. They came, more and more, and as they did, all sound was evacuated from the world, transforming it into a clear, limpid pool of silence. I turned my head, a movement that now seemed magnified amid the stillness. My ah lingered in the air, not yet absorbed into the sweeping quiet of the landscape. It seemed to persist, perched just above the calm.
I’d been enraptured by nature countless times before, caught in its web, unable to free myself, but I’ve never been able to put this into words. Nothing but my ah…I simply stood there in the midst of all of that confusion and clamour, the chaos swirling about, avid and avaricious. The silence encircled me, stealing the words from my throat. Countless times I’d praised the earth, the wild, but still I could not put into words that there was really no connection between us.
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Li Juan
“
Raymond stands and puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘If you need a decent funeral director, I’ve got a name.’ Of course he has. She has to face it. There’s no one else to help, and Marnie doesn’t expect her parents will travel down to London for the funeral. They were fearful before Hitler’s blitzkrieg, and still terrified more than four hundred miles to the north. Only she and her cousin, Susie, are left in London. Grandad’s diaries and order books went up in smoke, so there’s little chance of contacting even his best customers. Besides which, who has the will amid this chaos to attend the funeral of their tailor? At
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Mandy Robotham (The War Pianist)
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the mugs of tea now positioned amid the chaos of the dressing table – but Sarah shrugs her off.
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Teresa Driscoll (I Am Watching You)
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If, indeed, there be any one circle of thought distinctly and palpably marked out from amid the jarring and tumultuous chaos of human intelligence, it is that evergreen and radiant Paradise which the true poet knows, and knows alone, as the limited realm of his authority—as the circumscribed Eden of his dreams.
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Arthur Hobson Quinn (Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography)
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The sun had slipped past noon, and a slice of heat fell through the tree-house window, firing Laurel's inner eyelids cherry cola. She sat up but made no further move to leave her hiding spot. It was a decent threat- Laurel's weakness for her mother's Victoria sponge was legendary- but an idle one. Laurel knew very well that the cake knife lay forgotten on the kitchen table, missed amid the earlier chaos as the family gathered picnic baskets, rugs, fizzy lemonade, swimming towels, and the new transistor, and burst, stream-bound, from the house. She knew well because when she'd doubled back under the guise of hide-and-seek and sneaked inside the cool, dim house to fetch the package, she'd seen the knife sitting by the fruit bowl, red bow tied around its handle.
The knife was a tradition- it had cut every birthday cake, every Christmas cake, every Somebody-Needs-Cheering-Up cake in the Nicolson family's history- and their mother was a stickler for tradition.
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Kate Morton (The Secret Keeper)
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The architect wanted to create an atmosphere of discomfort and confusion. It’s supposed to represent the orderly extermination of millions amid the chaos of the war.
Is that what you see?
I see a small miracle that such a memorial even exists on this spot. They could have tucked it away in a field in the countryside. But they put it here, in the heart of a reunited Berlin, right next to the the Brandenburg Gate.
You give too much credit, my son. After the war, they all pretended they hadn’t noticed their neighbors disappearing in the middle of the night. It wasn’t until we capture the man who worked right over there that Germany is the rest of the world truly understood the horrors of the Holocaust.
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Daniel Silva (The Fallen Angel (Gabriel Allon, #12))
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Her mental space was a silent island of innocent neutrality, preserved amid the chaos of screams, blows and tears alike.
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Jolene Tan (A Certain Exposure)
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the boy had killed only eight. The presence of a lone FBI agent only complicated the situation more. What had he been doing there? Eyewitness reports of a brief firefight outside before the massacre only piqued his curiosity. A frenzy of reporters and news cameras had flooded the scene outside, held at bay by tight-lipped crowd control officers. Detective Harper noticed that Darion had failed to upload his video in time. After recovering the busted-up GoPro, he viewed the recording and was met with gruesome scenes of the carnage—death captured in real time. Harper placed it in a sealed evidence bag to be transported to the evidence room with everything else. The detective did a Hail Mary and then tried to get some ID on the shooter. Nothing on the scene directly linked him to a terrorist network. He had no identification on him. Suddenly, Harper heard on his radio that another man, who resembled the diner gunman, had been hit by a truck, not far from the diner. *** Craig tried his best to maintain control of the crash site. He called Patterson repeatedly but only got voicemail instead. A sick feeling brewed in his stomach as he heard sirens blare from a few blocks over. Police were everywhere on the street around him. Paramedics had the driver of the truck—an unconscious white-haired man—on a wheeled stretcher and fitted into a neck-and-shoulder brace. As they pushed him to the ambulance, one EMT held an oxygen pump over the man’s face and pumped intermittently. Rasheed lay in the road unconscious among broken pieces of the truck’s front end and a backpack full of pipe bombs. It was a surreal scene, the second time Craig found himself in the middle of the street amid destruction and chaos in a matter of days. The tide seemed to be turning against him. He forbade investigators to touch the pipe bombs and demanded that the paramedics handle Rasheed with the utmost care.
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Roger Hayden (End Days Super Boxset)
“
Marcus studied those NASA pictures for hours, the gorgeous Hasselblad pictures of men on the moon and the pictures of Jupiter’s turbulence. Since Newton’s laws apply everywhere, Marcus programmed a computer with a system of fluid equations. To capture Jovian weather meant writing rules for a mass of dense hydrogen and helium, resembling an unlit star. The planet spins fast, each day flashing by in ten earth hours. The spin produces a strong Coriolis force, the sidelong force that shoves against a person walking across a merry-go–round, and the Coriolis force drives the spot. Where Lorenz used his tiny model of the earth’s weather to print crude lines on rolled paper, Marcus used far greater computer power to assemble striking color images. First he made contour plots. He could barely see what was going on. Then he made slides, and then he assembled the images into an animated movie. It was a revelation. In brilliant blues, reds, and yellows, a checkerboard pattern of rotating vortices coalesces into an oval with an uncanny resemblance to the Great Red Spot in NASA’s animated film of the real thing. “You see this large-scale spot, happy as a clam amid the small-scale chaotic flow, and the chaotic flow is soaking up energy like a sponge,” he said. “You see these little tiny filamentary structures in a background sea of chaos.” The spot is a self-organizing system, created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it. It is stable chaos.
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James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
“
Lorenz had found unpredictability, but he had also found pattern. Others, too, discovered suggestions of structure amid seemingly random behavior. The example of the pendulum was simple enough to disregard, but those who chose not to disregard it found a provocative message. In some sense, they realized, physics understood perfectly the fundamental mechanisms of pendulum motion but could not extend that understanding to the long term. The microscopic pieces were perfectly clear; the macroscopic behavior remained a mystery. The tradition of looking at systems locally—isolating the mechanisms and then adding them together—was beginning to break down. For pendulums, for fluids, for electronic circuits, for lasers, knowledge of the fundamental equations no longer seemed to be the right kind of knowledge at all.
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James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
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It was left to Senator Isidor Rayner to conclude the hearings by saying: “As the ship was sinking, the strains of music were wafting over the deck. … It was a rallying cry for the living and the dying - to rally them not for life, but to rally them for their awaiting death. Almost face to face with their Creator, amid the chaos of this supreme and solemn moment, in inspiring notes the unison resounded through the ship. It told the victims of the wreck that there was another world beyond the seas, free from the agony of pain, and, though with somber tones, it cheered them on to their untimely fate. As the sea closed upon the heroic dead, let us feel that the heavens opened to the lives that were prepared to enter. “…If the melody that was rehearsed could only reverberate through this land ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ and its echoes could be heard in these halls of legislation, and at every place where our rulers and representatives pass judgment and enact and administer laws, and at every home and fireside…and if we could be made to feel that there is a divine law of obedience and of adjustment…far above the laws that we formulate in this presence, then, from the gloom of these fearful hours we shall pass into the dawn of a higher service and of a better day, and then…the lives that went down upon this fated night did not go down in vain.
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Charles River Editors (The Titanic and the Lusitania: The Controversial History of the 20th Century’s Most Famous Maritime Disasters)
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I am a puny part of the great whole. Yes; but all animals condemned to live, All sentient things, born by the same stern law, Suffer like me, and like me also die. The vulture fastens on his timid prey, And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs: All’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while An eagle tears the vulture into shreds; The eagle is transfixed by shafts of man; The man, prone in the dust of battlefields, Mingling his blood with dying fellow men, Becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds. Thus the whole world in every member groans, All born for torment and for mutual death. And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say The ills of each make up the good of all! What blessedness! And as, with quaking voice, Mortal and pitiful ye cry, “All’s well,” The universe belies you, and your heart Refutes a hundred times your mind’s conceit. . . . What is the verdict of the vastest mind? Silence: the book of fate is closed to us. Man is a stranger to his own research; He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes. Tormented atoms in a bed of mud, Devoured by death, a mockery of fate; But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes, Guided by thoughts, have measured the faint stars. Our being mingles with the infinite; Ourselves we never see, or come to know. This world, this theatre of pride and wrong, Swarms with sick fools who talk of happiness. . . . Once did I sing, in less lugubrious tone, The sunny ways of pleasure’s general rule; The times have changed, and, taught by growing age, And sharing of the frailty of mankind, Seeking a light amid the deepening gloom, I can but suffer, and will not repine.
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Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)
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it's hard to imagine, but even amid so much violence and chaos and loss, somehow the universe sometimes still manages to look beautiful.
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Amie Kaufman (Obsidio (The Illuminae Files, #3))
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You create a weird calm in my chaos,” he continues, voice low. “To everyone else, you’re a quake—a force to be reckoned with. But to me, you’re my calm amid the storm.
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P.S. Black (Shattered Ice (Hawksview U #1))